Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800-1865

by Christine Jacobson Carter

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Summary

In "Southern Single Blessedness", the only full-length monograph examining the lives of antebellum and Civil War southern women who never married, Christine Carter uncovers the fruitful and interesting lives of single women - and the attitudes toward them - in the bustling urban centers of nineteenth-century Savannah and Charleston. Carter's focus is on educated, financially secure white women, who joined in the culture's celebration of domesticity even though they had not married.Making effective use of contemporary fiction, advice literature, diaries, and letters to, from, and about single women, Carter shows that such women valued their independence and female friendships, and were in turn valued for their family and community service. She also explores their attitudes toward personal fulfillment, the relationships which sustained (and sometimes tormented) them, and the impact of the Civil War, as well as the southern and urban aspects of their public and private identities. Christine Jacobson Carter is a visiting lecturer in the department of history at Georgia State University. She is the editor of "The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge, 1848-1879". This is a volume in the "Women in American History" series, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Susan Armitage, Susan K. Cahn, and Deborah Gray White.

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